Engine room to sleeper carriage

Jenny Brown

The Grand Hotel building in Spencer Street. Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones

If Melbourne has a historic big end of town - a place where seminally momentous events occurred - then it is not at the top end around the Parliament precinct, nor in the banking and sharemarket quarters of Collins Street, but rather at the bottom end of the city centre in Spencer Street, where the town's founder, John Batman, built his homestead on the pretty rise above the Yarra known since the late 1830s as Batmans Hill.

Robert Hoddle set the datum, or primary reference point, for his layout of Melbourne's city centre on the hill, and the marker later set the references for Victoria's longitude and latitude measurements. After Batman left, his house became the colony's first administration office. The hill was also the venue for Melbourne's first race meeting.

At the birth of the railways in 1853, Batmans Hill was commandeered for a train terminus and its profile levelled. Yet the first Spencer Street station and yards soon proved inadequate for the needs of a transport system that put steel wheels under Victoria's economy through most of the following century, and that catalysed the decentralisation of the city's burgeoning population out into new suburbs that clustered along radiating tracks.

The elaborate staircase.

''Nearly everyone who can lives in the suburbs,''

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19th-century English visitor Richard Twopeny said, ''and the excellence of the railway system enables them to extend much further away from the city than in Sydney or Adelaide.''

During the boom years of rail expansion, when up to 6500 kilometres of track were rolled out in a single year, the government-appointed bosses of the profitable Victorian Railways, the ministers of transport and the various commissioners were the real power players.

''Treated like royalty'', these public-service supremos had enough clout to propose a railway administration building that, even in ''the era of extravagance'' at the height of Victorian architecture, was so palatial and imposing that the (former) Victorian Railways Administrative Offices (opened in 1893) became one of the grandest, most prestigious structures in a boom town that Twopeny noted as already having so many impressive public buildings ''that offer substantial testimony to the largesse of their views and the thoroughness of their belief in the future of their country''.

Its frontage was 130 metres long and it had an extraordinarily grand staircase lobby, loftily impressive executive offices and 3.6-metre-wide corridors. Designed by railway architect and engineer William Greene, a grandfather of the late Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, it was the biggest office block erected in 19th-century Melbourne for the biggest employer in the state.

In the following decades, it gained two more storeys to accommodate an eventual 1750 workers, whose chief operatives included ministers of transport such as Tommy Bent, John Cain snr and Robert Menzies, who used the position to cleave their way towards state and federal premierships.

The administration building remained important until the transport ministry relocated to new offices in 1983. Closed in 1985, as its future hung in abeyance, it was occupied by scores of homeless. Eventually, a long-mooted vision held by developer Les Erdi for the refurbishment of the building as a luxury hotel and apartment complex was permitted and with 240 residences (many in former offices with enough height to accommodate mezzanines), what is now the Grand Hotel and the Grand Central Apartments stands at a point of demarcation between the old City of Melbourne and its 21st-century extension, Docklands.